EU strikes major deal to reform migration policy after three years of bitter debates

The agreement, which is preliminary and still needs to undergo formal ratification, was sealed after marathon talks that began on Monday afternoon, continued throughout Tuesday and concluded on Wednesday morning, an intensity that reflects the high stakes on the table.

Negotiations focused on a vast and complex array of open questions that required compromises on both sides, such as detention periods, racial profiling, unaccompanied minors, search-and-rescue operations and border surveillance.

The Council, led by the Spanish presidency, defended a rigid position to give member states the widest margin of manoeuvre to handle migration, including by extending a proposed fast-tracked asylum procedure to as many claimants as possible, while the Parliament insisted on stricter provisions to respect fundamental rights. The European Commission also took part, providing assistance and guidance.

With the winter break looming ever closer, the co-legislators were under increasing pressure to patch up their differences, which in some cases were profound, and achieve the eagerly anticipated breakthrough. Thanks to Wednesday’s leap, the bloc will be able to push forward five interlinked pieces of legislation that redefine the rules to collectively receive, manage and relocate the irregular arrival of migrants.

The laws, known as the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, were first unveiled in September 2020 in an attempt to turn the page on decades of ad-hoc crisis management, which saw governments take unilateral and uncoordinated measures to cope with a steep rise in asylum seekers.

These go-it-alone policies severely undermined the EU’s collective decision-making and left Brussels looking like an inconsequential bystander in what is arguably the most politically explosive issue on the agenda.

At its core, the New Pact is meant to establish predictable, clear-cut norms that bind all member states, regardless of their geographic location and economic weight. The ultimate goal is to find a balance between the responsibility of frontline nations, like Italy, Greece and Spain, which receive the bulk of asylum seekers, and the principle of solidarity that other countries should uphold.

“Great news. We did it! We have an agreement on the whole Pact on Migration and Asylum. We have been negotiating in trialogues for two days and two nights,” said Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, celebrating the news.

“Now we have agreed on a comprehensive pact on migration and asylum with better protection of our external borders, more solidarity and more protection for the vulnerable (people) and the asylum seekers, based on our European values. I’m so proud today.”

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said 20 December 2023 would “go down in history” as the day “the EU reached a landmark agreement on a new set of rules to manage migration and asylum.”

“Europe has once again defied the odds,” Metsola said on X, formerly Twitter.

Wednesday’s preliminary deal will now be translated into amended legal texts, which will have to be first approved by the Parliament and, later, by the Council. Given the extreme sensitivity of the issue at hand, last-minute demands from governments should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, the approval in the Council will be done by a qualified majority vote, meaning individual countries will not be able to veto.

The cycle must conclude before Brussels comes to a total standstill ahead of the next elections to the European Parliament, scheduled for early June.

Five laws, one pact

The New Pact on Migration and Asylum is a legislative project with an all-encompassing approach that intends to piece together all the aspects of migration management, from the very moment migrants reach the bloc’s territory until the resolution of their applications for international protection. 

Overall, it is meant to cover the “internal dimension” of migration while the “external dimension” is addressed through tailor-made deals with neighbouring countries, like Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt.

The five laws contained in the New Pact are:

• The Screening Regulation, which envisions a pre-entry procedure to swiftly examine an asylum seeker’s profile and collect basic information such as nationality, age, fingerprints and facial image. Health and security checks will also be carried out.
• The amended Eurodac Regulation, which updates the Eurodac, the large-scale database that will store the biometric evidence collected during the screening process. The database will shift from counting applications to counting applicants to prevent multiple claims under the same name.
• The amended Asylum Procedures Regulation (APR), which sets two possible steps for asylum seekers: a fast-tracked border procedure, meant to last a maximum of 12 weeks, and the traditional asylum procedure, which is lengthier and can take up several months before a definite conclusion.
• The Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR), which establishes a system of “mandatory solidarity” that will be triggered when one or more member states come under “migratory pressure.” The system will offer countries three options to help out: relocate a certain number of asylum seekers, pay a contribution for each claimant they refuse to relocate, and finance operational support.
• The Crisis Regulation, which foresees exceptional rules that will apply only when the bloc’s asylum system is threatened by a sudden and massive arrival of refugees, as was the case during the 2015-2016 migration crisis, or by a situation of force majeure, like the COVID-19 pandemic. In these circumstances, national authorities will be allowed to apply tougher measures, including longer detention periods.

The negotiations between the Council and the Parliament had been playing out for months, first in separate talks on each legislative file and, most recently, in the so-called “jumbo” format, where the five draft laws were considered all at once under the mantra “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

The discussions became an intense, time-consuming back-and-forth, with each side trying to hold their ground against the other’s demands. Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a third-term Spanish MEP who acts as rapporteur for the Crisis Regulation, previously described the process as “the hardest one I’ve ever experienced.”

Member states were bent on preserving the hard-fought compromise they had struck among themselves after years of fruitless and bitter debates to reform the bloc’s migration policy. The compromise was particularly delicate on the system of “mandatory solidarity” envisioned under the AMMR: countries had agreed on an annual quota of 30,000 relocations and a €20,000 contribution for each asylum seeker they reject.

But lawmakers resented the Council’s unyielding position and urged flexibility to meet halfway. Some of the last remaining differences were the scope of the 12-week border procedure, the detention of irregular applicants, a mechanism to monitor fundamental rights and the concept of third safe countries.

Poland and the Baltic states pushed for special rules to cope with the instrumentalisation of migrants, a phenomenon which themselves suffered first-hand in 2021 when Belarus orchestrated an influx of asylum seekers in retaliation for international sanctions.

Meanwhile, as talks gathered pace, humanitarian organisations stepped up their public campaign to warn the New Pact risks normalising “arbitrary” detention and sending migrants back to countries where they face violence and persecution.

“We are acutely aware that politics is often about compromise. But there are exceptions, and human rights cannot be compromised. When they are weakened, there are consequences for all of us,” more than 50 NGOs said in an open letter this week.

One of the signatories, Caritas Europa, added on Wednesday that “the Pact does not solve the EU’s asylum issues; it actually limits access to asylum and rights for those seeking protection.”

It described itself as “concerned by the tremendous detrimental impact the Pact risks having on people seeking protection in Europe” and warned that “widespread detention and poor reception standards” and “rushed asylum procedures with restricted safeguards and appeals” are likely to happen.

Wednesday’s deal comes days after Frontex, the bloc’s border and coast guard agency, said irregular border crossings had surpassed 355,000 incidents in the first 11 months of the year, the highest number for that period since 2016.

The continued rise in border-crossing incidents injected momentum into the negotiations and pulled the New Pact out of the political limbo it had been stuck in since 2020.

This article has been updated with more reactions and information.